Federal Transit Funding

by Editor
June 19, 2018 at 8:27 am

http://www.smartertimes.com/1596/federal-transit-funding

"How The Koch Brothers Are Killing Public Transit Projects Around the Country" is the online headline over a top-of-the-front-page news article by Hiroko Tabuchi in today's Times. The story is flawed on a number of levels, but one passage I found particularly jarring was this one: "The paucity of federal funding for transit projects means that local ballots are critical in shaping how Americans travel...."

Paucity, according to my authoritative Webster's Second Unabridged dictionary, means "fewness, small number" or "scarcity, dearth, insufficiency." The Federal Transit Administration says it awarded a total of $127,633,817,113 in 24,044 grants over the years 2007 to 2017. That doesn't include $8,330,000,000 in grants or funds awarded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) or the Public Transportation Emergency Relief Program, which added at least another $277,500,000 for transit systems affected by Hurricances Harvey, Irma, and Maria and another $10,400,000,000 for transit operators affected by Hurrican Sandy. If you do that math, it brings the total to $146,641,317,133. Those are just the federal grants — it doesn't count the money the transit agencies collect in fares, or raise by issuing bonds whose interest is exempt from federal income tax, or collect in subsidies from state and local taxpayers.

Advocates of more federal mass transit funding may consider $146 billion over 11 years to be a small number, a "paucity." But for the Times news article, in its own voice, without attribution, to endorse that view is to take a side in a controversy about which the Times is supposed to be a neutral, objective, voice. There may be extraordinary situations in which that abandonment of neutrality is called for in the news columns. But it's not clear to me, at least, that the debate over the proper level of federal funding for mass transit is one of those situations. And even if such an abandonment of neutrality were called for, wouldn't it make a stronger case if the Times were honest about it, and said something like, "Even the $146 billion that the federal government already spent on mass transit in the past decade or so isn't enough to have a functioning system once the transit unions skim off their rake" instead of inaccurately characterizing the $146 billion in federal spending as a "paucity"? Someone reading the article might come away with the impression that there's a paucity of careful editors over there.

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